Mit vierzehn Jahr’ und sieben Wochen ist der Backfisch ausgekrochen

AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN YEARS AND SEVEN WEEKS, German girls were said to become Backfisch. The term comes from the fishing industry, referring to fish too large to be returned to the water but so small as to be suitable only for baking (German backen), and in reference to women is more or less synonymous with “teenager.” During this period of her life a young bourgeois woman navigated the difficult transition to adulthood, shedding childish behaviors such as selfishness and stubbornness in favor of the sense of duty, domesticity, and orderliness necessary to be a successful wife and mother. In the late nineteenth century German Backfisch had their own literature to narrate the transformation of a young tomboy into a responsible, marriageable young woman. The most well-known example is likely Emmy von Rhoden’s Der Trotzkopf (1885). The novel traces the fortunes of wild, unruly tomboy Ilse, who is sent by her father and stepmother to a boarding school and comes home tamed, transformed into a mild, marriageable young woman. According to Dagmar Grenz, the story of Der Trotzkopf, and I would argue, the story of Backfisch literature in general, is that of an “ungeheuren Erfolgs” (monstrous success). The novel has sold millions of copies, ran to hundreds of editions, has been adapted for film and television, and remains in print today. Jennifer Redmann classes these novels as a type of “extended Bildungsroman,” which “offers readers struggling through the ‘awkward years’ between the ages of twelve and sixteen a model for the successful transition to maturity.” Though derided by critics then and now for their kitschiness and sentimentality, Backfisch books were a highly successful and influential form of genre fiction that shaped the reading habits of generations of German girls.

In this essay I will examine twentieth-century girls’ novels from the Stuttgart-based youth publisher Union to see how they show the emergence of the modern teenage girl. Originally published in the magazine Das Kränzchen, these novels showcase two divergent understandings of young people: youth as a problem to be managed and brought under parental and adult authority, and youth as an emerging demographic in its own right, with enough autonomy and spending money to make it the target of marketing efforts.